Indoor and outdoor high-adventure activity centers and theme parks featuring thrilling amusements like obstacle courses, zip-lining, wall climbs and human coaster rides, are becoming increasingly more popular throughout the world. Paramount considerations for theme parks and other venues offering these attractions include safety, scalability and increased thru-put. These considerations are particularly acute with respect to zip-line courses and human coaster rides, where riders are moving at fast speeds at high elevations and depend on the reliability and operation of the mechanical devices and systems making up the zip-line courses and coaster rides. The theme parks, adventure centers and other venues offering these high-excitement rides also need systems that are easily scalable so as to accommodate various types of riders and ride experiences and that also have satisfactory thru-put, i.e., are able to accommodate multiple riders at the same time on a single ride to keep the size of waiting lines down and/or moving.
Both zip-lining and coastering are amusements that depend upon gravitational force for moving riders, rather than a motor that accelerates and decelerates riders in a controlled manner. More specifically, the zip-line or coaster track(s) over which a rider and the trolley or trolley system traverses often begin at an elevation that is higher than that at which the zip line or coaster track(s) finish. Zip lines and coaster track(s) may also contain varying elevations that cause the rider and its trolley system to accelerate and decelerate and generally move along the zip line or coaster track(s), similar to how a passenger cart moves along a traditional roller coaster. Accordingly, because these amusements do not rely on a motor for controlling movement, but rather simply work on gravitational force, motion of the rider and the trolley must be controlled by braking, dictated either by implementing changes in the grade or elevation of the zip line or coaster track(s) and/or braking components contained on the trolley or trolley system and/or the zip line or coaster track(s) themselves.
Braking based on the grade of the zip line or coaster track(s) has attendant dangers, as the degree of acceleration and deceleration of the trolley will vary with the weight of the rider and the degree of slope of the cable, leaving operators of zip-line and coaster rides with little control over the speed of a rider once the trolley has left the starting location and is moving along the track(s). Accordingly, incorporating braking technologies into the trolley itself has gained favor and become prevalent on zip-line and/or coaster amusements.
With that said, conventional mechanical braking systems implemented directly on trolleys and trolley systems and on zip-line and coaster rides still lack important features, including providing progressive speed restriction of the trolley and its rider at the terminal section of the zip-line and/or coaster where the ride ends, providing a single trolley system that accommodates and performs effective braking for riders of a wide range of sizes (e.g., height and weight) and providing a trolley that can be controlled and brought to a stop as needed at any point along the zip-line or coaster ride.